Notes on Heartbreak

by Annie Lord

And even though I knew he wasn’t there, I slept on my side of the bed, knowing this logic no longer mattered, wishing it still did.

But just because you know the name of a flower doesn’t mean you understand what it is to be one.

That’s the thing about pain: we forget it. Our bodies can withstand more than we give them credit for.

I like to measure my tears too. To see my suffering quantified, categorised.

If he never cries, does that mean his grieving process never ends or does it mean he never grieves at all?

One school of scientists believes that memories are not singular occurrences that we return to, but rather endless repetitions of that memory and the memory of that memory and that memory and so on. There is no stable ‘memory fragment’, or what is often called a ‘trace’; instead, we create a new ‘trace’ each time to house the thought. Meaning each memory is a mere copy of a copy, each one a more distant reconstruction of the first.

I helped hide his actions from him because I wanted him to keep committing them.

They say that nothing good ever happens after 2 a.m. but I like to stay for the bad bits.

Love feels like cherishing a little yellow duckling in your hands. That’s a disgusting way of describing something, but it turns out love is fucking disgusting.

That’s the thing with revelations: they come and then you ignore what they show you and continue on in the way you behaved before. It’s only in retrospect that you look back and recognise that this moment of clarity was the moment where you began to change – the start, the beginning, all you could ever hope for.

Before you, I thought you only got love if you were skinny, but you can have your cake and eat it and have a man too.

Love is losing control. It’s like trying to hold onto water.

I was so secure in this love, I thought that he would forgive me for each and every one of those mistakes, but soon they all piled up and there were too many of them and all these tiny ones were enough for him to say, ‘I want to be on my own.’

Love and hate are so close together some think they are two parts of the same feeling.

I could find your lips with my eyes closed.

There’s no one more beautiful than the woman who has taken a man from you.

This is the central paradox of love: it longs for closeness but the more you achieve it, the less you value what you’re attaching yourself to.

My feminism doesn’t include women that date men I’ve gone out with.’

I’m understanding there’s not one ‘over’. Nothing snaps into place in a moment. There are just lots of small ‘overs’ where gradually you start to understand that you won’t be how you used to be anymore, and maybe that’s OK because maybe the new you will be all right too.

this life could be gorgeous if only I gave myself permission to allow it.

We are the sum of our actions, otherwise what else are we?’

Things can happen without you there and you will miss out. But it might give you the strength to be fully there for something else that happens another day.

Perhaps no one ever forgets anyone. We keep parts of them inside us forever and they come out in the moments we need them. Like ghosts who can’t find their way to the afterlife.

I’m still not sure if you learn anything from pain, though I do think you learn from what you do to get away from the pain.

Releasing each other might have been our greatest act of love.